The amount of image and video content that is being created and distributed on a daily basis is staggering and continuing to increase. This growth is being driven not only by professional content production, but also due to the wide availability of low cost video cameras and network distribution services.
Conventional image and video coding techniques such as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group, H.264/MPEG-4 (Moving Picture Experts Group) Part 10 or AVC (Advanced Video Coding), and its successor High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), are used to encode the image and video content to reduce bit rate and storage requirements. While substantial improvements in encoding efficiency have been realized using conventional prediction and transform coding techniques applied to the image or video to be coded, the resolution of digital still picture cameras and video cameras continues to improve, demanding increased storage and bit rate requirements.
As defined herein, a video is recorded program of related scenes or segments. An image may be considered a subset of the video and will be referred to as a segment.
In consumer electronic devices, it is common to store multiple videos and collections of images. This type of storage provides the benefit of being able to view a particular image or video at the convenience of the consumer. It is easy to accumulate a large number of images and videos. Similarly, servers that are used for online streaming store massive amounts of images and videos to download and view. There are also very large storage requirements for video surveillance systems in which multiple video cameras continuously acquire videos of usually repetitive scenes.
A video series refers to a collection of video programs that unfold in a sequential episode-by-episode manner. A video series can span entire TV seasons or even decades. Worldwide, the “soap opera” is the most prominent form of a video series. Video series also tend to be highly repetitive in terms of scene content.
Therefore, there is a need improve the encoding of collections of images and videos.